农产品供应链管理-外文翻译

外文翻译

原文

Supply chain management for agricultural products

Resource: MBA (IT), IIIT Allahabad Pulastya Roy Agriculture is a significant sector of most of the economy of world. Agriculture derives its importance from the fact that it provides any a country self reliance in terms of food for their people, providing huge direct and indirect employment and more over huge revenue by export of surplus food grain. Agriculture is backbone of the economy and infrastructure for many countries like India, Brazil and others. Due to technical advancement, improved irrigation system and several other reasons production in agriculture has increased several folds. To meet this increased production and business in agriculture sector an equally reliable supply chain support is imperative.

Supply chain is basically-“a set of processes functioning synergistically to satisfy a customer’s demand”. Any supply chain trades off between two main attributes of supply chain, “Efficiency and Responsiveness”. Any supply chain is adopted or designed keeping only this two attributes in mind because it defines about which kind of customer the supply chain wants to cater and what is the scale of “return on investment” is being planned for. Agricultural industry uses bo th kind of supply chain as per the need.

Designing supply chain for agricultural products:

Most of the produce in agriculture can not be sold directly; as per their mode of consumption they can be categorized as follows.There are some products which are not highly perishable like cereals but needed to be processed like- rice is polished, and wheat has to be husked.Some products are highly perishable so they must be sent to market very fast or otherwise needed to be processed and packaged well.

For designing a supply chain for any Agriculture product, it’s important to know which kind of agriculture products is that, and accordingly a responsive or efficient supply chain is designed.

Supply chain for non perishable items:

Most all the cereals like Wheat, Rice, Maize etc. and some vegetables like

Potato and Onion are highly inelastic in demand, moreover they are not highly perishables so the supply chain for such products should focus more on efficiency and cost effectiveness than responsiveness. These products have vital supply and demand links with the market. Cereals needs some kind of processing and polishing after they are harvested from field and from here onwards supply chain comes into play. The food grain is then packed in jute bags and then stored in cold storages till they get order from market.

These type of agricultural products are highly in elastic in demand and the demand more or less remains constant so their demand can easily be forecasted and hence while designing supply chain for such products efficiency should be more preferred.

Supply chain for perishable items:

Fruits, green vegetables and flower come under perishable items and they need all together a more responsive, fast and accountable supply chain as a means of propagation from farms to the market.

These products are elastic and erratic in demand hence their demand forecasting is also difficult. They need more costly type cold storage and refrigeration, special transportation mechanism and on time delivery, all these requirements make this supply chain very costly, but at the same time the price of these products are consummately adjusted to ensure higher margin and profit. While designing supply chain for such items main focus should be given on the responsiveness.

Supply chain management for fruits:

To handle supply chain for these items is a very demanding task. Such products need facilities like refrigerated vans, more efficient cold storage faster transportation. This is the sector where India needs more improvement. India is the second largest producer for both fruits and vegetables, next only to China. Major vegetables include potato, eggplants, tomatoes, cassava, cabbage, dry onions, cauliflower, pumpkin, okra and green peas, while fruits include mangoes, oranges, apples, grapes, pineapples and papaya. So we severely need better support system to handle this massive produce. For example refrigerated vans, the need for refrigerated vans is driven by economics. Every year, India wastes over 30 per cent of the fruits and vegetables owing to shortage of proper cold chain infrastructure. As of today, most of the fruits and vegetables and meat get spoilt by the time they are transported from the farmlands to the retail chains in the cities. The export potential of fresh fruits,